Top 280 Immanuel Kant Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.”

— Immanuel Kant

102. “Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.”

— Immanuel Kant

103. “All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.”

— Immanuel Kant

104. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...”

— Immanuel Kant

105. “When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward.”

— Immanuel Kant

106. “Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.”

— Immanuel Kant

107. “Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.”

— Immanuel Kant

108. “An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.”

— Immanuel Kant

109. “We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of skepticism.”

— Immanuel Kant

110. “Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.”

— Immanuel Kant

111. “Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors.”

— Immanuel Kant

112. “Arrogance is, as it were, a solicitation on the part of one seeking honor for followers, whom he thinks he is entitled to treat with contempt.”

— Immanuel Kant

113. “We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle “nature”. We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.”

— Immanuel Kant

114. “Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful.”

— Immanuel Kant

115. “Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility.”

— Immanuel Kant

116. “Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.”

— Immanuel Kant

117. “Aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made.”

— Immanuel Kant

118. “Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.”

— Immanuel Kant

119. “One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”

— Immanuel Kant

120. “Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.”

— Immanuel Kant

121. “The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth.”

— Immanuel Kant

122. “Beneficence is a duty; and he who frequently practices it, and sees his benevolent intentions realized comes, at length, really to love him to whom he has done good.”

— Immanuel Kant

123. “It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.”

— Immanuel Kant

124. “So act that anything you do may become universal law.”

— Immanuel Kant

125. “Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment.”

— Immanuel Kant

126. “Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.”

— Immanuel Kant

127. “Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.”

— Immanuel Kant

128. “It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.”

— Immanuel Kant

129. “The existence of the Bible is the greatest blessing which humanity ever experienced.”

— Immanuel Kant

130. “I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.”

— Immanuel Kant

131. “At some future day it will be proved, I cannot say when and where, that the human soul is, while in earth life, already in an uninterrupted communication with those living in another world.”

— Immanuel Kant

132. “Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification.”

— Immanuel Kant

133. “In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.”

— Immanuel Kant

134. “Reason should investigate its own parameters before declaring its omniscience.”

— Immanuel Kant

135. “Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.”

— Immanuel Kant

136. “Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.”

— Immanuel Kant

137. “Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.”

— Immanuel Kant

138. “It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.”

— Immanuel Kant

139. “Freedom is the opposite of necessity.”

— Immanuel Kant

140. “Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.”

— Immanuel Kant

141. “A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.”

— Immanuel Kant

142. “Act so as to use humanity, yourself and others, always as an end and never as a means to an end.”

— Immanuel Kant

143. “Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.”

— Immanuel Kant

144. “Honesty is better than any policy.”

— Immanuel Kant

145. “It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.”

— Immanuel Kant

146. “Handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, dass sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde.”

— Immanuel Kant

147. “The ideal of the supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause.”

— Immanuel Kant

148. “Every beginning is in time, and every limit of extension in space. Space and time, however, exist in the world of sense only. Hence phenomena are only limited in the world conditionally, the world itself, however, is limited neither conditionally nor unconditionally.”

— Immanuel Kant

149. “The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.”

— Immanuel Kant

150. “The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.”

— Immanuel Kant